A young writer from the Muslim republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus, Ganiyeva initially refused an invitation to a writers’ meeting when she learned that it was going to turn into an official audience with the prime minister over tea.
Her ethnicity, in this case, was not very relevant to her unease. While she recognized that she would be used as a multi-ethnic “decoration” in the meeting, the real reason she initially refused was part of a more widespread attitude common among a number of writers who consistently avoided any audience with Russian leaders, as if the leader’s mere presence could contaminate them.
“Initially, I decided not to go because I believe that there is very little point in these meetings,” Ganiyeva explained a few days after the meeting. “And they cast a shadow on your reputation. For me it’s an unconscious feeling. Every time there’s a meeting between writers and the government, there is an inexplicable feeling of resistance and some revulsion.”
Her editor at the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper talked her into going, explaining that it would be “cowardly” not to and suggesting she ask about Mikhail Khodorkovsky – the staple oppositionist question used to demonstrate defiance. Ganiyeva, however, recognized the banality of asking about Khodorkovsky for the hundredth time and listening to Putin’s answers about the rule of law. Instead, she decided to bring up the controversial law on extremism, whose broad wording was widely used to jail oppositionists and expand the powers of the FSB (the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation).
“I decided to go and see this person who was shrouded in so many myths,” she said. The day before, she was telephoned and told that she would be sitting right next to Putin during a tea that would follow the meeting. Ganiyeva recalled with irritation how she was even told to wear something nice, “as if I had the intention of showing up in a torn sweater.”
If Putin was initially shrouded in myth, Ganiyeva couldn’t help feeling disappointed when she saw a small, pale, ordinary man, an official trying to ingratiate himself with a group of writers – that enviable class known in early Soviet times as “the engineers of the soul.” Putin seemed to be as curious about the writers as they were about him, eyeing them intently as if they were a bunch of strange animals. He smiled and laughed with the group in what clearly represented a “mask” he wore with the intelligentsia, as if he was trying too hard to make himself liked. Ganiyeva, who was seated just right of Putin during the tea, couldn’t help but notice that he filled a whole notebook page with platitudes about writers and power, jotting down every obvious word in his large script.
But the behaviour of the group revealed far more than Putin’s awkward camaraderie. As they waited for the meeting to begin, some took to drinking the strong alcohol on supply, talking and joking. Others, like the writer Zakhar Prilepin, struck a pose of defiance, while many others appeared to be obviously enthralled.
“There was a change in mood when he entered the room. Everyone stood. I remained seated [along with another writer], and there were looks of disapproval,” Ganiyeva said. She went on to describe a scene involving a popular writer who “nearly melted” when Putin sat down next to her, turning radiant and engaging the prime minister in a whispered conversation. No one, of course, paid much attention to the actual union meeting – all eyes were on the whispering. Ganiyeva described how, following the tea, the popular writer immediately approached Putin with entreaties to visit, and as she grabbed his hand Putin became so flummoxed that he dropped a pile of books he had been forced to take. Flustered, he bent down to pick them up as she continued talking.
For Ganiyeva, however, the chief disappointment wasn’t Putin’s awkward ordinariness, or the sycophancy of some of the writers (she had anticipated that). It was that she never got the chance to ask a question. She went on at length justifying it, as if suggesting to herself that it was all for the better, and then going back to her regret as if it was all she had left from the meeting. That Prilepin, a member of the outlawed National Bolshevik party, managed to ask Putin about his billionaire friends and embezzlement at state-owned companies without a blink of an eye probably compounded Ganiyeva’s regret.
“I didn’t like the questions being asked,” she said, explaining that Prilepin’s was one of the few honest questions. “And I didn’t want to be too insistent. Everyone was raising his hand, Putin had to refuse them. And I didn’t want to be told to wait my turn. I consoled myself that maybe it was for the better that I didn’t ask. I might have just scored some liberal points. I just wanted to sit there incognito and watch, after all.”
But by not asking, she appeared somehow to feel that she had failed to justify her compromised presence. “It felt uncomfortable that I was there and didn’t ask a question,” she admitted.
And without a question, without speaking truth to power, the meeting left her more vulnerable to a perceived “closeness” to power that she was instinctively revolted by. What, apart from the popular writer’s ingratiation, did the revulsion pertain to, exactly? That she was in the same room, witnessing the fawning and by proxy taking part of it?
4.
On April 29, 2011, one of Vladimir Putin’s routine visits across the country found him in Penza, a provincial capital about 600 km southeast of Moscow. Before chairing a meeting on cultural development in a recently restored local theatre where he pledged to help subsidize a six billion rouble theatre district, Putin, as has been his custom, convened with his people right in the street.18
An unofficial video circulating on the internet shows the prime minister approaching the pavement. As he does, a multitude of cheers are heard from the crowd. The sound, once again predominantly female, is a more intense, louder variant of the curious wails I heard ten days before, in Moscow. And just as in Moscow, these sound less like jubilant cheers and more like desperate cries – either for help, or from relief of finally seeing him (the residents, of course, had been waiting for hours in the rain). Indeed, someone called out, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, please help us!”
In a clear shot of Putin in the midst of the crowd, with his hand extended, a middle-aged woman, with short-cropped hair dyed dark red, is kissing his hand, amid repeated exclamations of “thank you.” As she tugs at him, he reluctantly offers his cheek. She kisses him on the cheek, then grabs his neck and kisses him repeatedly on the ear. With an expression of amusement bordering on disgust, he carefully and expertly frees himself from the embrace. Several women shout, “We love you!” He responds, “I love you too.”
This grotesque display of adulation was circulated over the internet and met with ridicule – but it was ignored by national television, which apparently recognized the discomfort that this somewhat unconscious behaviour elicited not just in those who somehow succumb to it, but in Putin himself. Two hundred, one hundred or even seventy years ago, it would have been an accepted norm – with Joseph Stalin stoically suffering through better choreographed communions with his people.
Somehow, despite the revulsion of the elites and a muted disapproval from the state, this behaviour has survived centuries of violent modernization, occurring in the 21st century and contaminating far more orderly displays of deference to power. No one approves of it – not even those who unconsciously take part – but it still manages to surface in the most unexpected places.
The “Putin phenomenon” – the stability of his rule and the entrenchment of key features like bureaucratic loyalty and corruption – has been attributed to his popularity and, by sceptics, to high oil prices that have managed to keep the population complacent. But popularity and oil prices are too temporary to explain the perennial structural relationship Russians build with their state – and this explanation suggests wrongly that the majority of people who voted for Putin actually “like” or “prefer” him in the same way that an American voter would “like” or “prefer” Barack Obama.
Attitudes towards Putin have been examined largely in the context of his popularity on the one hand, and his contrast to his predec
essor, Boris Yeltsin, on the other.19 But Putin’s high approval ratings – averaging at over 70 percent before 2011 – do not indicate a genuine admiration among respondents who, pollsters have told me, are often simply answering what they feel is required of them. Moreover, based on interviews I conducted in 2010-2011, the same person can show feelings of exceeding gratitude (“we would fall at his feet”20) one moment, and attitudes of scepticism, disappointment and ridicule the next (“It’s all for show, his behaviour. Nothing changes.”21)
Behaviours like the one exhibited by the Penza woman have been attributed to a latent personality cult, but that would not explain the ways these behaviours present on a spontaneous level. The Putin cult doesn’t even have to be fostered by the government – much of it springs up from below, from sheer inertia, camp and irony-infused, with the potential of social networking at its disposal.22 And compared to Stalin, Putin is “no führer and no demagogue,” according to Lev Gudkov, the head of the Levada Centre, who insists there is no evidence of mass adulation in the surveys. “The basis of the trust in him is quite conservative, and, unlike totalitarian leaders, he is not connected to ideas for a new world order.”23
On February 24, 2009, the postcard of Putin was removed from the desk of the translator at our organization in anticipation of a visit from Putin himself. But ten years before that visit, when that same building was the home of a Kremlin think tank, the staff – internet-savvy liberals – sported t-shirts bearing the anaemic, expressionless profile of the young presidential candidate, Yeltsin’s heir apparent, and the inscription: “Putin is our everything.”24 The words were a pun on “Pushkin is our everything” – a phrase that defined another century-old personality cult, around the poet Alexander Pushkin.
What accounts for that kind of behaviour, if neither popularity nor a powerful cult can fully explain it?
Sitting at my desk in February 2009, I felt the contagious excitement of some of our middle managers as they waited for Putin to appear. But it wasn’t the excitement of meeting someone famous. There was another even more important reason. Like many organizations, ours was funded by the state. Putin’s visit fell at the start of the year, when budgets were confirmed. In the unending, often unconscious scramble to secure funding, one cannot fail to see the advantages of being noticed in a positive light and the risks of being disgraced. And so it is easy to understand both the excitement of someone like a popular writer meeting Putin, and a local in Penza, who will be reaping the material benefits of a Putin visit (repaired roads, a new theatre, cleaner streets) for years to come.
When Putin came to power in 2000, contemporaries described it as a spontaneous surrender. Not a single weapon was brandished, not a shot was fired – there was no skirmish, no struggle.
Looking back with horror at the mess that resulted when society was left to its own devices in the wake of a revolution, the sheer despair that one is overtaken with when faced with the futility of organizing infrastructure between communities separated by thousands of kilometres, some people surrendered, others gave up, still others criticized, resignedly, just for the record.
Oligarchs and regional leaders were “stumb[ling] over each other in trying to show their support for Putin,”25 according to scholar Nikolai Petrov. Alexander Oslon, a pollster for the Kremlin, described people eager to stop swimming against the tide, to let the river have its way, and to revert to habits of subservience that had, over centuries, developed as a coping mechanism for subjects otherwise faced with the vast, flourishing chaos that was one sixth of the world’s landmass.26
And so, what emerged with the beginning of the millennium in Russia was part Tsar, part General Secretary, part CEO, part patrimonial lord. A guarantor of stability when he could satisfy yearnings for order and profit – and an impotent, corrupt oprichnik when he could not. To understand why that is the case, one needs to move away from Putin, and look at the people he rules – the quotidian scurrying of living in their harsh environments.
Chapter 2
The Petition
“It is important to use all means to help a single specific individual resolve his issues, his problems, perhaps even his tragedies.” - Vladimir Putin
“Jah will give us everything. We have no more problems.”
- Boris Grebenshikov,
leader of the rock band Aquarium
1.
A GROUP OF three women – one middle-aged and two quite visibly old – were seated on a plush, blue, faux leather couch, where, having met in the central reception office for Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, former president, and current chairman of the United Russia party, they shared their woes with each other, as they would at a water cooler.
The older one was trying to keep back tears. It was not a life-and-death issue; but she was visibly upset: having survived German captivity during the War – a victory that was still celebrated with the pious intensity of the nation’s only truly religious holiday – she couldn’t convince local authorities to provide her with anything better than fourteen metres of living space.
But Sergei Kvitko sat separately; sat and waited patiently, clutching a small suitcase. He did not appear destitute, he was not a pensioner. He was not a middle-aged woman. Looking slightly older than forty-one, he had the self- sufficient posture of a man who supported a family of four on less than £300 a month.
A mine worker, he would wake up each morning, and, shivering in the cold, load the furnace with firewood to start heating his home. “You know how hard that is with two children?” he complained. “And we don’t have electricity all the time.”27
Like many rural homes – and Kvitko lived in a mining settlement just outside of Novomoskovsk, a small town in the Tula region – his had no central heating, but it had a television set. And the evening news showed a repeated image that filled him with hope: his cold-eyed sovereign talking incessantly about the one thing he owns a lot of, when Kvitko has none: gas.
On closer inspection, Kvitko’s somewhat sunburnt face (it was a frigid February) looked rustic and tired. There was a scar on his right cheek.
The moment he saw a fellow human being waiting to listen to him, recorder poised, all the grievances started pouring out.
“I had to pay for my own way to help out in the rescue efforts at Lubyanka.” It turns out that Sergei Kvitko was contracted in March 2010 to aid rescuers in the tunnels of the Moscow subway, where two suicide bombers detonated themselves just half an hour apart on Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations, killing forty. He had to pay for the trip himself, and now he feels jilted: he helped his government look for dead bodies in subway tunnels, and now his government won’t even bring the gas that it promised his settlement in 2007.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich always says that money is being spent on gasification. I think he will help. And if he doesn’t, then no one else will bring gas [to our homes].”
2.
Alexei Anisimov, the director of the Central Reception Office for United Russia party chairman Vladimir Putin, made himself comfortable behind his huge, enamelled desk, with a single portrait behind him (and in those days of diarchy, two portraits – not one – was the norm).
“I just hope you’re mindful of what you print,” he said with a disarming grin, “because when it’s about a person of such…” he didn’t finish, and motioned vaguely with his hand towards the portrait. “Well, you either say good things or…” He meant to say “or nothing at all,” in accordance with the Russian maxim about talking of the dead, but just waved it off cheerily.
That warning made sense later in our conversation, because Anisimov directed a very peculiar socio-political institution. On the one hand, here was a perfectly normal – democratic, even – venue for citizens to share their everyday problems with elected officials, the United Russia deputies, either municipal, regional, or federal, who headed these reception offices.
But unlike functioning Western democracies, these deputies did not seem to be catering directly to their petitioners
– and Anisimov’s post did not depend on whether he was re-elected by the voters he would receive with their requests. Instead, he had another client – Vladimir Putin. And his motive for doing his job well – solving the problems of these half-destitute citizens – was to seek not votes but the approval of his boss. That approval would come in the form of several subsequent promotions. About a year after we met, Anisimov would go on to serve as deputy campaign manager during Putin’s re-election in 2012. Shortly after that, he would be appointed to head a department in Putin’s Presidential Administration.
Like many party initiatives, linking these reception offices to its chairman came directly from Putin, who touted them as an effective means to communicate with his citizens. But Anisimov seemed to be struggling as he described Putin’s exact role in these reception offices.
“We know how great… er, not great, but how big…”, here he stumbled again, self-consciously trying to avoid sounding too Soviet in describing Russia’s National Leader, “how big the potential, the rating of the chairman of the party is among the population. And how great his authority is on all official levels.”
In other words, having potential voters complaining that their social rights were being violated wasn’t enough of a stimulus for local deputies to make sure that regulations were being followed and that people were getting their allotted apartments, gas, electricity and social benefits. Instead, the deputies needed the direct oversight of the national leader to motivate them.
“All party resources were involved, and not just party resources, since the status of the chairman of the party facilitates this [mobilization].”
Even if the reception offices had turned into a populist gimmick for a former president intent on maintaining control of all spheres of public life after stepping down to the rank of prime minister, they seemed to have a perfectly institutional base.
The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult Page 5
